Environment – Space junkies

Around two billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. An estimated 3.6 billion people don’t have proper sanitation. Inequality and competition over resources drive political instability, which will likely get worse with climate change and biodiversity loss.

So, what do the world’s super-rich elite do? They build ever-bigger rocket ships to try to get beyond the moon, to Mars or to maybe one day establish a new colony elsewhere in space. It’s been a typical response in humanity’s past – instead of living within our means in a way that respects all life, we wreck local ecosystems and then go looking for the next frontier, to move in, colonise it, and wreck it, too, going further afield every time.

But is going out into space to set up new settler colonies the best/only/right response? I say no.

The world’s biggest super-rockets built by Space X have both exploded just after launch. The energy and resources required for space colonisation are beyond viable limits. Creating new settlements in space, because we’ve wrecked what we’ve had here, is irresponsible, inequitable, far-fetched, and can never be a morally appropriate solution. It’s all too expensive, dependent on scarce resources, elitist and an escape strategy for the uber-rich, but leaves disenfranchised people and animals with the ruins on planet Earth.

But it is fanciful to think that even elites might even get there. Since 1957, there have been 6300 successful rocket launches of 14,460 satellites, and 630 explosions, collisions or unplanned events.

There are 100,000 more satellites proposed for launch by 2030. But there are millions of pieces of space junk in low-Earth orbit. Because of the cumulative effects of space junk, it may become impossible to even sustain satellites safely. More satellites and space junk mean more collisions, which means even more space junk, in a never-ending cycle of increasing risk, known as the Kessler syndrome.

The New Zealand Government is in partnership with local runanga to develop Kaitōrete Spit, south of Christchurch, into a launching site for experimental aircraft, drones and rockets. The spit and nearby waters are habitat for rare and endangered species including the plant tororaro, and Hector’s dolphins.

The National Party’s pre-election policies supported two more aerospace test zones and a Minister of Space. New Zealand wants a piece of the space economy pie and is prepared to use fragile and threatened ecosystems and taxpayer dollars to do it. Space is increasingly militarised, and whether space development purposes are peaceful or not is often unclear.

The introduction to Star Trek said: ‘Space: the final frontier’, and it certainly is in terms of sustainability or principles of human engagement. So, while the uber-rich look for a bolthole in space, the world’s poor continues to search for clean drinking water, and rare plants and animals are collateral damage.